Acorn25 - Reclaiming the Cloud

Every other Monday night I host a small gathering online, which I call the 'Experiment 2025.' Around six of my friends (give or take) log in from Los Angeles, Lancaster, Manchester, London, and Bristol, to come together and talk through the themes that have come up for us creatively over the past couple of weeks, and what we're negotiating and playing with.

To kick it off, this year, we've used the structure of Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way – a book that has its share of issues but also has provided a route of returning for me over the last twenty years of my life. (And I'm not alone.) Not everyone in the group is doing the book, but it provides a light framework for themes, which has helped us to begin a small community that I hope will continue for a long time.

Last night, I framed a new prompt for the group: I said, 'What question have you been noodling on lately?'

And one of my friends, someone who has worked in interactive digital media since its inception, only to discover that he loathes the internet as it exists right now (like so many of us), responded:

'What would a Dogme 95 manifesto for the internet be?'

For those of you who weren't film obsessed teenagers comme moi, Dogme 95 was a movement initiated by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995 with the purpose of reclaiming power for directors and artists, and away from studios, by focusing on 'rules' that prioritised great acting and storytelling and lowered budgets – such as: Shooting must be done on location, films must be set in the now, music must occur in the scene itself rather than be added later as a score, and no artificial lighting – or artificial action – is allowed.

The Dogme 95 filmmakers weren't saying that all films ought to be like that. Just that this was a valid way of making films, which didn't require big budgets to be great. They were saying: there is another way forward. And that if you made films in this manner you were part of the movement.

I may or may not have loved a few Dogme 95 directors back in high school. So when my friend brought the question to the proverbial table last night, my mind started whirring.

So...here is a first stab at a Dogme 95-esque manifesto for the internet.

First, to explain the name I've given it:

I recently inhaled Octavia Butler's Parable duology, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. These absurdly prescient books presage a president aiming to 'make America great again,' the Los Angeles fires, and the absurdity of wealth division that we are currently living inside of, while largely taking place between 2024-2032. (My sister has a theory that Butler had to die moderately young because she knew too much.)

I will probably come back to these books here, as they have been subtly but deeply reshaping my view of how to engage with reality in a number of ways.

But for now, I will simply relay: In them, a community grows, and the first community space they inhabit, they call Acorn. And so, in homage to the brilliant Octavia, I'm lifting that as a (working) title for my stab at a Dogme 95-esque reclaiming of the grounds of the internet.

A first draft:

Acorn25 - A Manifesto to Reclaim the Cloud

Acorn25 is a practice of planting seeds that help you to become/express yourself, in communication and collaboration with community.

We believe that there is no real 'point' to life, that it is up to us to create meaning for ourselves. Yet, we sense that the thing that seems to bring the most joy to human beings is truly connecting with one another.

The internet once provided opportunities to do this, before cloudgrabbers turned us all into serfs tilling their digital soil. We are searching for ways to reclaim our hearts and minds, which the cloudgrabbers seek to control both during our hours we give to work and the hours that should be ours.

As such, we have created the following practices in order to figure out how to engage with the internet as free people:

1. The point of speaking online is sharing in a real way: bringing ideas into conversation and connection with one another, not participating in any economy or posting as a means to an end. So:
2. We share process rather than product.
3. We prioritise sharing true imperfection in public as a practice.
4. We post under 'pen names' where possible, treasuring a digital anonymity not because it gives us the freedom to say bad things about others, which we vehemently disengage from, but because we believe that in order to keep our physical world safe, it is healthiest to keep our digital selves one step removed.
5. We only use the mediums that call to us individually and follow no rules for 'success.' There is no 'content methodology.' There is no 'content.' There is only a free-flowing stream of ideas.
6. We do not care about numbers and do not think anything is better about you if yours are higher. We are not engaging in a popularity contest. We are building community.
7. We support making mistakes in public, subtle conversations, and nuance.
8. We believe we can shape the cloud to support our lives rather than steal them.

That's where I've gotten up to so far, and it is the point of this experiment that you are reading. And therefore, I'm not allowed to overthink before posting it, or worry that it is 'wrong,' or that I'm 'not supposed to post it yet' – because the point is process, not product. Because the point is making mistakes in public. Because for me, that would be a wonderful new way forward.